Malcolm Bruce and Expenses

Full expose in the Daily Telegraph of Malcolm Bruce's expenses.

As he says on his own web site with an April 2008 update date and justifying his expenses

These allowances have been established because MPs do work long hours, are away from home for four days a week for much of the year and travel extensively around their constituencies and between London and Westminster.To do this they need staff support, a place to stay in London and the means to rent and run an office in their constituency.

So why is he claiming for an office outside his own constituency?

I also assume that he won't be claiming so much this year since his wife is now one of my local councillors having managed to come in second best in an election recently.

As I said at the time

I do hope that Rosemary can juggle her family life, Office Manager job (As hubbies 30k Diary Secretary) and the work of a Councillor, or will being a Councillor be second best to helping her hubbie.

Also nice to see how he can claim for an MP's office in a village more than 30 minutes from the biggest town in his constituency and at least an hour from much of his constituency. The Daily Telegraph has this to say

Between April, 2006, and March, 2008, he was paid a total of nearly £3,100 towards the cost of electricity, heating and cleaning at his main home in the village of Torphins, just outside his constituency of Gordon. Over the same period, he received a total of £61,186 from the additional costs allowance (ACA) for his second home in London.

The Torphins claim was made despite Mr Bruce having a constituency office in Inverurie, about a 30-minute drive away, also funded by the taxpayer. The ACA claim included regular monthly spending of more than £300 on food, close to the maximum of £400. In one month, August, 2005, he successfully claimed £451 for food.

As I detailed before we have also seen the following from the Bruce's

I see our prospective Liberal Democrat Councillor Rosemary Bruce in the Aboyne, Upper Deeside and Donside by-election advertises herself as an Office Manager.

She is currently an office manager, but has previously worked in both training and hotel management

Strange. I thought she was the Diary Secretary for her Husband, Malcolm Bruce M.P. , at a cost of about £28,500 to us, the general public.

No mention of who she was an Office Manager for and the fact that the office was miles from the people he represents.

MPs' expenses: Liberal Democrat MP Malcolm Bruce claimed running costs for two homes - Telegraph

Total Clegg Up

Watch Clegg blame Conservative for just about anything. The man is deluded. The main interest starts about 2 minutes into the extract. It's like listening to Nick Griffin the BNP leader espousing his fear of immigrants but in reverse. Fearmongering at it's worst. Some background on the European Arrest Warrant which was also opposed by Liberty. As John Wadham, director of Liberty said of the Bill:

"Speeding up the bureaucracy of the extradition process needn't be a problem - but we need safeguards to ensure you aren't sent to a foreign prison, under foreign
laws, without good reason.

"This Bill, and the EU arrest warrant, seek to cut away those basic protections. Foreign authorities should need to show they have a
substantive case against the person to be extradited. We must have adequate protections against improper extradition".

BBC NEWS | Politics | Stand tall in Europe, Clegg urges

Ministers lay blame for Aberdeen’s cash woes on Liberal Democrats

Happily these days we are no longer living in Aberdeen as the council struggles to deal with a budget that is causing closure and cuts in a number of services, I must say I would tend to agree with the SNP who have said

...blame for the financial troubles at Aberdeen City Council was placed on the former Liberal Democrat administration yesterday.

This prompted claims that the accusation by SNP ministers will split the current Liberal Democrat-SNP coalition leading the city.

Spending watchdog, the Accounts Commission, has called a public meeting to investigate the council’s “precarious” financial position. It follows an Audit Scotland report that criticised staff absence rates, and the failure to introduce planned savings.

The furore over the council’s £27million budget cuts flared up in the Scottish Parliament yesterday.

The SNP in Aberdeen have inherited a precarious position from the Lib Dem's and now have to tighten the strings to get back to a decent financial position. Tough decisions have had to be made which the Lib Dem's preferred to brush under the carpet.


Press & Journal - Home Page - Ministers lay blame for Aberdeen’s cash woes on Liberal Democrats

A Fairy Tale Degree in Selkies and Kelpies

The popular superstitions and festive amusements of the Highlanders of Scotland [by W.G. Stewart.]. By William Grant Stewart

According to the Scotsman you can now do a post-graduate degree in Scottish Folklore at Glasgow University.

Anyway I'm putting my wife up for this as back in 1822 her 4th Great-Granduncle, William Grant Stewart, wrote the above book.

At least there should be more truth in the book than there was in the Labour and Lib Dem Manifesto's from 2005 which are now proven to be true Fairy Stories.

Selkies and kelpies: The fairytale degree - The Scotsman

A question for my MP Robert Smith

I have a question for my MP Robert Smith. It is a simple question.

Why do you not honour your promises. Specifically your pledge to give me a Referendum on the European Constitution or as it is now known the "Lisbon" Treaty.

Back in 2003 and when writing about the then EU constitution in the Guardian, Nick Clegg, the present LibDem leader had the following to say about the need for a Referendum.

To consult the people, or not. That is the question. A question which is now setting pro-Europeans against each other. A question which is straining what is left of the cross-party pro-European alliance in British politics.

Cemented by a collective drive to urge both Tony Blair and the country towards the euro, politicians from all three major parties have worked more closely together in recent years than is often appreciated. Gordon Brown's grumpy refusal to budge on the single currency reinforced the common cause: to overcome the Treasury's myopia and allow the country to have its own say.

It is ironic, then, that the new source of internal dissent within the Europhile camp should be precisely the catalyst which brought the camp together in the first place: whether or not to hold a referendum. Yet the unity mobilised in favour of a referendum on the euro has evaporated when faced with the question of a referendum on the EU's new constitution.

Opinion on both sides is turning sour. The other day, a Labour colleague in the European parliament let slip the depth of feeling. "You're just playing straight into the hands of the Eurosceptics!" he wailed. We have worked together closely for years in an effort to drum up a bit of enthusiasm for the European project in our Midlands constituencies and rarely disagree on matters European. I admire him enormously and would almost count him a friend. This made his reprimand all the sharper.

Tony Blair, I'm told, has reacted with derision to the Liberal Democrat decision to call for a referendum on the new EU constitution. With that partly in mind, perhaps, he loftily declared in a newspaper interview this week that New Labour is "the only serious game in town". With his habitual amnesia he went on to assert that holding a referendum was out of the question since it was not consistent with British political "traditions". This from the man who gave us referenda on a Hartlepool mayor and Scottish autonomy. Never let the facts get in the way of a good political putdown.

The real reason, of course, why the government does not want to hold a referendum is the fear that it may lose. It is the same fear that has paralysed Blair on the euro for six long years. It is the same fear that led Peter Hain to camouflage the constitution with comic inaccuracy as nothing more than a "tidying up exercise". It is the same fear which has long restrained New Labour from expressing the courage of its meagre convictions on Europe. And it won't do.

The alternative, now unfolding before us, is infinitely worse: a false assumption that anti-Europeans are democrats, and pro-Europeans are not. By shilly shallying with semantic half-truths about the content of the constitution, and now haughtily dismissing all calls for a referendum, it is New Labour which is, to cite my friend, "playing straight into the hands of the Eurosceptics". By providing the hapless Iain Duncan Smith with a pretext to champion people's democracy, Blair is unwittingly doing more to reinvigorate Euroscepticism than John Redwood could manage in his wildest fantasies. Nothing will do more damage to the pro-European movement than giving room to the suspicion that we have something to hide, that we do not have the "cojones" to carry our argument to the people.

And our argument is strong. The constitution, assuming it emerges roughly in its present draft form, provides ideal ammunition to call the Europhobes' bluff. While it is no mere "tidying up exercise", it is galaxies away from the "blueprint for tyranny" laughably paraded by the Daily Mail. Even a cursory glance at the text - and I remain struck how few Europhobes seem to have bothered to read the offending document - would reveal that it is a significant reorganisation of how the EU will take decisions in the future, with some well reasoned pooling of sovereignty in areas such as a common asylum and immigration policy. It takes only hesitant steps towards greater EU coherence in foreign policy, and arguably weakens the position of key federal institutions such as the European commission. Far from being a Napoleonic plot to overturn centuries of plucky British autonomy, it represents a logical evolution in EU governance.

Compared to many of the previous steps in European integration, not least the Single European Act negotiated by Margaret Thatcher, it is fairly modest in scope. The bulk of the innovations in the constitution relate to the archane mechanics of the EU institutions themselves - the size of the commission, voting weights in the council of ministers, etc - rather than any revolutionary creation of new EU powers. The measured modesty of the constitution is precisely what is being obscured by the government's refusal to hold a referendum. In doing so, it has allowed the phobes to shift the argument away from the constitution itself and onto shriller claims about the democratic legitimacy of the whole EU. By forcing the phobes to argue on the substance of the text, a referendum would expose the hollow hysteria of their polemic.

Naive? Perhaps, a little. Inevitably, any referendum campaign is unlikely to be a scholarly examination of the legal content of a complex constitutional tome. It is possible that it will soon escalate into an unconstrained debate about the very place of Britain in the EU - in or out. So be it. A combination of outright isolationism, which remains the overriding instinct of the Conservative party and significant parts of the press, combined with mendacious claims about the constitution itself, will soon repel the vast majority of British voters. The electorate is not enthusiastic about the EU, that much is obvious from a volley of opinion polls. But, when push comes to shove, it is not prepared to countenance withdrawal, and more susceptible to reasoned support for European integration than is commonly assumed.

Blair has already jeopardised his place in history by failing to put the case for the euro to the British people. He now risks blowing it altogether.

Now in this new age when we look at the Lisbon Treaty Mr Clegg has changed his mind. Apparently the Lisbon Treaty is different, it must be, as according to him it is "smaller" despite being 8000 words longer, how did they manage this, oh yes they changed the line spacing. It is different despite being according to Parliament 96% the same (only 10 out of the 250 proposals have changed).

The following statements have been made about the "Treaty"

1. The author of the Constitution Valery Giscard d’Estaing has said that “All the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way.”
2. Former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato has said that: “They decided that the document should be unreadable. If it is unreadable, it is not constitutional, that was the sort of perception... Should you succeed in understanding it at first sight there might be some reason for a referendum, because itwould mean that there is something new.”
3. Belgian Foreign Minister Karel de Gucht has said that, "The aim of the Constitutional treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable… The Constitution aimed to be clear, whereas this treaty had to be unclear. It is a success.”
   

So all three of the above has wanted to dupe the European public into believing this Treaty was not the constitution.

I can understand why Mr Brown does not have the courage to go for a Referendum. He knows that despite his pledge in June 2007 that

“The manifesto is what we put to the public. We've got to honour that manifesto.
That is an issue of trust for me with the electorate.”
(Gordon Brown, interview, 24 June 2007)

He cannot honour Labour's Manifesto Pledge (Page 84 of the 2005 Labour Manifesto) as he will lose.

So I ask you Mr Smith why you cannot have the strength of your convictions as laid down in the Lib Dem 2005 Manifesto that

Membership of the EU has been hugely important for British jobs, environmental protection, equality rights, and Britain’s place in the world. But with enlargement to twenty-five member states, the EU needs reform to become more efficient and more accountable. The new constitution helps to achieve this by improving EU coherence, strengthening the powers of the elected European Parliament compared to the Council of Ministers, allowing proper oversight of the unelected Commission, and enhancing the role of national parliaments. It also more clearly defines and limits the powers of the EU, reflecting diversity and preventing over-centralisation. We are therefore clear in our support for the constitution, which we believe is in Britain’s interest – but ratification must be subject to a referendum of the British people.

Do you no longer believe this or are you just a stooge for the party rather than the public who elected you. Have you as Mr Hague said yesterday about the Lib Dems become

"so shrill - they have become separated from their cojones".

This despite a promise from Mr Clegg that his Lib Dems would 'prove their cojones' on the issue of Europe.

Now, Mr Smith, I didn't vote for you, I voted for a party that has held strong on it's promise to vote for a referendum, but you are my representative in Parliament and I could at least support you on your promise to give me a referendum, so why have you reneged on this.

You could have done what you promised your constituents and voted for a referendum but instead you toed the party line, despite many of your fellow Lib Dem MP's having the cojones to vote for what they had been elected on.

At the next election I will try to ensure you are not voted in again. I may just even, for the first time in my life, vote tactically to ensure you are no longer my MP.

My MP is supposed to put his constituents first, he is their representative in parliament, You have failed on this basic task, so why do you deserve to be in Parliament?


We need an EU referendum | Politics | guardian.co.uk

Update: Brethren Cautioned on SNP placards removal

In an update to this story it appears that the 5 people were members of the Brethren Church. Make of that what you will!


Five men have been cautioned by police after Scottish National Party placards were removed in Aberdeenshire.

I wonder who they might have been considering the constituency is Gordon!

Cautions on SNP placards removal

Stewart Whyte or Trough Feeding Lib Dem

Just received the latest version of what purports to be the West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine News. It is in fact an election document from the Lib Dems full of their usual bar charts, half-truths and deceptions.

The biggest deception is of course the format and title. Have a look at the image below. The first thing to notice is that nowhere on the front does it say this is a piece of Lib Dem propaganda, no it purports to be "News" and tries to look like a free newspaper.


In fact it has nothing to do with news as can be seen from the next image which is the main headline.
Are the lib dems so dim they don't know who their opposition is. Good though to see that they are predicting a close contest here.

The title is just so typical of the Lib Dems who though purporting to be the "nice" party are in fact the most underhand, sleazy, condescending and just plain dishonest of all the major parties, which when they have Labour to compete against says something.

Perhaps if the headline had said

STEWART WHYTE or the Trough Feeding Lib Dem

it might have been more honest.

Then we could have had a couple of bar charts of number of mortgages taken out by the Lib Dem and then a profit from our money bar chart (£40000 and counting).

If you had any doubt about who to vote for before this should have made your decision just that little bit easier.